Music and people hold my life together. I describe experiences, discoveries and insights, often connected with music and with teaching and playing piano. The blog is a way to stay in touch with friends, and may also be food for thought for anyone else, especially people connected with music and the piano/
Musik und Menschen halten mein Leben zusammen. Ich beschreibe Erfahrungen, Entdeckungen und Einsichten, oft in Zusammenhang mit dem Klavierspiel und dem Klavierunterricht.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Once a year, usually in the winter, I like to choose a theme for the studio recital. The audience enjoys hearing music that follows a topic, and the students get the feeling that they are part of a common project. The topic is just as important as the individual performances, and that can even help to cope with stage fright.

Outside of that, a theme is a good way out of the “age and level trap”: the youngest students play first, the oldest students play last. As the program progresses, the pieces get increasingly longer and more complex, while the audience’s attitude gradually changes from complacent boredom to awe-inspired exhaustion.Variety keeps the mind alert. A short, simple folk tune can be very refreshing after a complicated etude, and also a good reminder that great accomplishments are rooted in modest beginnings.

The idea for “Scenes of Childhood” had been on my mind for a long time. There are so many beautiful pieces for children and about childhood: Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood; his Album for the Young; Tchaikovsky’s Album for the Young; Debussy’s Children’s Corner , to name just a few, and perhaps the most well-known. Those pieces aren’t exactly easy, but by last summer, it looked as if I had just the right crowd of people together to make the theme a project. In my mind, I was already assigning pieces, and planning the program.

That was the idea, but life sometimes develops its own ideas. In the fall, several more advanced students I had counted on were not available. For others, the pieces I had planned simply didn’t fit their program. At the same time, I didn’t want to let go of the theme.

I made a list of everybody’s pieces, and started to look for ways how I could make them fit into the topic. The first group of pieces featured music written for children throughout the centuries. I would guess there is so much, because most people start to learn music as children.

Music for Children

Folk Song

Old Mac Donald had a farm

Juliette Testa -Licata

Folk Song

Twinkle, twinkle little Star

J.C.F Bach (1732-1796)

Theme and Variations

Birgit Matzerath

J.S. Bach (1685-1750)

Little Prelude in d-minor

Hanna Cox

L. Mozart (1719-1787)

Minuet in F-major

Nicole Phillip

Kabalewski

(1904 -1987)

Ukrainian Folk Dance

Lily Kubany

C. Czerny (1791-1857)

Allegretto op 824 No 18

William Gallo/ Ilze Abersone

Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)

Sonatina in C-major, op 36,1 Allegro

Hanna Cox

In my introduction, I gave a short comment on each piece. I talked about the role of folk tunes in teaching a musical instrument; about the musician fathers J.S. Bach and Leopold Mozart, who wrote music to teach their musical children. The composer Kabalewski’s interest in teaching inspired him to write many piano works for beginning students. Student/teacher duets can lend thin melodies a solid foundation, and the presence of the teacher inspires confidence. I also explained the musical form of variations and sonatinas.

The second group of pieces featured music by children, a minuet that W.A. Mozart composed at the age of 6, and two student compositions.

Music by Children

W.A. Mozart (1756-1791)

Minuet in C-major K 6

Nicole Phillip

Janae Khan

The Music I hear

Janae Khan/Birgit Matzerath

Hanna Cox

Waltzing Cadence

Hanna Cox

The third group presented music that reflects our contemporary tastes, and the things we do in our pastime. We listen to tunes from movies, TV series and pop songs. My Favorite Pet turns out to be a computer mouse, and if you manage to be very quiet in the middle of all that noise, you may even hear Whispers from Outer Space.

Play and Pastime

Rodgers/Hammerstein

My favorite Things

Zoe Selesnik/Haifa Nouaime

V. Guaraldi

Linus and Lucy

Zoe Selesnik

Mike Schoenmehl

(*1957)

Kriminalmusik

India Jones

J.Bhasker/A Moore/ N. Ruess

Just give me a Reason

Ainsley Newhook

Olson

My favorite Pet

Janae Khan/Birgit Matzerath

Seymour Bernstein

(*1927)

Whispers from Outer Space

Nicholas Pardo

In spite of technology, the important events in a child’s life have not changed that much.

We celebrate birthdays - at this point, we sang Happy Birthday for everybody in the room who had a January birthday.

We long to see Foreign Lands and People, and travel more than ever.

There are the “year-end” celebrations of different countries and cultures: Halloween, and the German custom of St Nikolaus, who comes on December 6 and brings sweets to the children in Germany.

In my childhood, he always brought his servant and handy man Knecht Ruprecht, a rather unpleasant guy, who carries the presents in a big sack. The sack was also used to carry the bad kids away with him. The tale was still around when I was little. More progressive parents like my own didn’t promote it, though and I assume that Knecht Ruprecht eventually ran out of work and took retirement. At the same time, it is important for piano students to know about the tale in order to make the piece sound scary, rather than fast.

Christmas without Silent Night is like childhood without dreams.

The ability to dream is often more developed in children than in adults. Of course, you can lose yourself in dreams. Some people may actually dream their lives away, but at their best, dreams inspire people to create a better reality. Wishing the children and young people that they will get many chances to make their dreams come true throughout their lives, and for the adults that they haven’t lost the ability to dream, and still allow themselves to be inspired by their dreams, we closed the recital with Schumann’s Träumerei or Reverie.

Important Events

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Important Event

Birgit Matzerath

Traditional

Happy Birthday

Janae Khan/Birgit Matzerath

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

From Foreign Lands and People

Helen Chen

S. Lyngra

Skeleton Bones

Nicholas Pardo

German Folk Song

Lasst uns froh und munter sein

Andrea Northfield

Robert Schumann

(1810-1856)

Knecht Ruprecht (Knight Rupert)

Grace Trenouth

Gruber

Silent Night

Ainsley Newhook

Robert Schumann

(1810-1856)

Reverie

Adrienne Klusey

Adrienne, who played the piece, happens to be my most advanced student at this time, but it is mere coincidence that she played last.

Most students performed more than once in the course of the program. It’s a good thing, because it keeps their attention alert.

We had a complete run through of the recital at the group classes in January, where I played the pieces of the students who were absent. At the class, I had also prepared a list of questions about the pieces, that the students were to follow and answer while listening to the music. It helped them listen more closely, and at the recital, they were as attentive as never before.

I am very grateful that my adult students agreed to participate, and it was wonderful that family members volunteered to accompany. In fact, that led to the idea of having a family recital at some point. One theme recital generates the next...

Theme recitals do create more work for the teacher than traditional recitals. Programming, no matter how you do it, always requires thought and organization. When you program around a topic, you have to invest additional research, thoughts, ideas and time, but it all pays off when you see how everybody enjoys it.